Carolyn Drake: Among the Animals in Turkey

This week in the magazine, Elif Batuman writes about the Turkish ornithologist and conservation biologist Çağan Şekercioğlu, in the northeastern Turkish city of Kars, a place Batuman describes as “a city in suspended animation, a museum of its more prosperous past.” We knew that if any photographer could capture the essence of a town frozen in time, or a subject described as “monomaniacal” when it came to animals and ecological preservation, it would be Carolyn Drake.

“It was three days of constant movement and not much sleep,” Drake told me. She visited a garbage dump as darkness fell to watch brown bears dig through sprawling piles of trash; went in search of wolves in a forest but found only a frozen sheep carcass; and watched as scientists dissected a bear while Turkey’s best taxidermist gave instructions over the phone from Istanbul. Only after all of this did Drake visit Şekercioğlu’s bird-banding station in Aras, “a beautiful oasis where the pace finally slowed,” and there she made the photograph that opens the piece in this week’s magazine.

“Every time I tromp in and out of a situation so quickly, I leave with a vague feeling that I did something wrong,” Drake said. “Like I’ve rushed in, scooped up some treasures, and am stealing them back to my world without fully understanding what I saw or did. On assignment, a photographer doesn’t actually have to completely understand. We deliver the pictures and can then stop thinking about it.”

Here’s a selection of her photographs from that trip.

A street vendor in Kars, a city that was once the capital of the medieval Armenian kingdom.